Fifty-five
As McIlhenney drove inside the cordon that had been set up around the building, a plastic coffin was being slid into a dark blue mortuary wagon. The scene had been played out before in the Wild West; it never failed to draw a crowd. The superintendent looked around as he stepped out of his car, seeking out familiar faces, and seeing a few, older and more leathery, but probably no wiser for all the time that had passed since he and McGuire, in their uniform days, had forged their reputation as hard men by cracking their heads together.
‘Gary Starr’s board man?’ he asked Wilding, as he came towards him from the stairway door.
‘Yes, killed with a single shot to the head. There’s no exit wound, so Arthur Dorward reckons it was probably a hollow-point bullet.’
‘Initial thoughts?’
‘He knew his killer, and didn’t suspect him. There’s not much of a lock, but there’s a spy-hole in the door and a chain and a bolt on the inside. In this place, if you’ve got those you use them, so I reckon that Ming let the guy in.’
‘Neighbours?’
‘I’ve interviewed everybody on the stair, including the local cannabis supplier. Wise monkeys, the lot of them; saw nothing, heard nothing, couldn’t tell me anything.’
‘Who found the body?’
‘I did, with PC Drake. We came to pick him up. He called me this morning to tell me he could identify the bloke with the missing finger.’
‘Christ,’ McIlhenney exclaimed. ‘I wonder if he told anyone else?’
‘That’s been on my mind too, sir. Could the guy have found out somehow?’
‘Did he tell you anything about him when he called?’
‘He said that he’s involved in the management of a club. He was going to take me there.’ Wilding paused. ‘Sir,’ he asked, unable to hold back the question any longer, ‘why are you here and not DCI Mackenzie?’
‘Bandit’s on holiday; he’s taking ten days off.’ The sergeant looked at the ground. ‘He’s on holiday, Ray,’ McIlhenney repeated. ‘It was booked in before he was transferred. Understand?’
‘Yes, sir, I understand.’
‘Let’s go down to Queen Charlotte Street: I want to review where we are in this whole business.’
‘Are you setting up the mobile HQ?’
‘Here? We’d need to put a guard on it. We won’t get anything out of this place other than any forensic traces that Arthur’s lot turn up. Come on, I’ll give you a lift.’
Fifty-six
When Skinner and Shannon returned from Bakewell a note was waiting on the DCC’s desk. ‘Come and see me: AD.’
Dennis was behind her desk when they answered her summons. ‘How did you get on?’ she asked.
‘As well as can be expected,’ Skinner replied. ‘Moses told her he was a copper, but Esther had no idea what he really did. His continuing existence seems to have been kept within the family; apart from her, all the rest of them thought he was a civil servant.’
‘We’re not going to have a media problem, are we?’
‘I don’t see it, not if they get his body back for burial.’
‘We can’t authorise that, Bob: that’s a Ministry of Defence decision.’
‘Amanda, I don’t care whose decision it is. It’s got to happen, and that’s an end of it. We’ll need a cover story as well, to explain his death. If you’re sensitive about it, leave it with me and I’ll make arrangements.’
‘If you think you can,’ she said, ‘but you may not find it as easy as you think. Those MoD people can get hung up on secrecy.’
‘Eventually we all take orders.’ As if to make his point, he continued, ‘Now, what have you got for me on Ormond Hassett MP?’
‘Him?’ She frowned up at him. ‘He’s not the bumbling grain merchant that we thought. He graduated from Cambridge forty-one years ago, and won a rugby blue in the process. From there he joined the army, Royal Green Jackets; he did two tours in Ireland, then served in Germany for five years but there’s no record of what he was doing. That probably means he was watching the Russians.
‘Aged thirty-one, he was given a posting to the Washington Embassy as military attaché and spent two years there. That was followed by a year in Whitehall, before he resigned his commission and went into the family business. He didn’t stay there long, though: he was elected to Parliament in the Conservative victory of 1979. He had a three-year spell as Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Minister of State for Defence. Towards the end of his stint he wound up back in Washington, as the leader of a back-bench group lobbying American support for the Falklands war. There’s a curious coincidence here, although probably no more than that: the adjutant to that party was Major Joshua Archer, second battalion, the Parachute Regiment.’
‘Coincidence is a far rarer occurrence than people think,’ Skinner retorted.
‘Maybe; but there could have been little future contact between them, since Archer was killed a few weeks later.’
‘Did they know each other before?’
‘I don’t know. I’ll try to find out. If I compare their service records, it might tell me something.’
‘What happened to Hassett after the Falklands?’
‘He resigned as PPS after the 1983 election because he wasn’t given a ministerial appointment. There was some curiosity about that: received wisdom among the parliamentary lobby correspondents was that the Prime Minister of the day thought that he was too right wing.’
‘Jesus, that’s quite a statement.’
‘Indeed! It didn’t stop him getting on to the Defence Select Committee, though, or later from becoming one of the first members of the Intelligence and Security Committee. He sat on that until 1997. After that he seems to have confined himself to agricultural matters, until finally the most recent leader of Her Majesty’s opposition gave him a job as a shadow spokesman.’
Skinner smiled. ‘What the hell do they think we are? Hicks from the sticks, it seems. Did that man Frame really expect us to believe that a man like that wouldn’t know his son was a spook? And what about the question beyond that: if he knew that, did he know what he was up to? Amanda,’ he asked, ‘is there any way you can access Piers Frame’s service record? I’d like to see whether he’s crossed Hassett’s path before.’
‘Only the Director General of Six could authorise that, Bob.’
‘Then maybe we’ll have to ask him.’
Fifty-seven
‘I know about the drugs find, Ray,’ said Neil McIlhenney, seated in the chief inspector’s room in the Leith police office. The sergeant’s face reddened. ‘It’s all right, I’m not coming after you for it: I know you better than that. DCI Mackenzie put his foot in it, but that knowledge goes no further than you, me and Mario. The SDEA want his head on a pole, but they’re not having it; they’re not even getting his name.’
‘What about the chief, or the DCC, if they go to either of them?’
‘The chief knows: he’ll tell them where to go if necessary. The DCC’s frying other fish just now.’
‘So what happened in Pamplona?’
‘The local police went crashing into the middle of a Guardia Civil stake-out; they were working with the SDEA, following up a lead that came out of Dundee six months ago. They’d been watching the place all that time. They even had photographs of your man Ming dropping off the A Class, but they didn’t know who he was.’
‘Couldn’t they trace the car from the plates?’
‘They did, but Starr wasn’t stupid. They belonged on a BMW owned by an insurance broker in Hampshire.’
‘Couldn’t they have followed him back to Scotland?’
‘They didn’t appreciate what was going on then.’
‘What did they find when they raided the garage?’
‘Thin air. And traces of decent-quality cocaine. What did you do with the stuff you found in Starr’s safe?’
‘It’s here, locked up in ours, along with the money.’
‘Jesus! At the very least Bandit shou
ld have reported it to our own Drugs Squad, and given it into their custody.’ McIlhenney looked at the sergeant. ‘Ray, I know it’s only been a few days, but what’s it been like working with him? Off the record; nothing will get quoted to anyone.’
Wilding thought for a little, framing his answer. ‘Let’s say it’s been a learning curve, sir. He has his methods, and they’re a bit unorthodox, but that doesn’t make him a bad cop.’
‘If they work it might make him a good one.’
‘Granted. The thing I’ve found difficult is his unpredictability. Just when I think we’re starting to get along, he’ll flare up. Like this morning: we were interviewing Starr’s ex. She’s forthright, but no ogre, and she was co-operating, when out of the blue, the Bandit tore into her. When I asked him why the hell he’d done that, he tore into me. Wee things seem to set him off: today I reckon it was the fact that you’re moving Stevie Steele down to Leith.’
‘What does your gut tell you about him, Ray?’
Wilding frowned. ‘When I was a kid, I had an uncle with a drink problem, although I didn’t know about it till I was a bit older. He acted just like DCI Mackenzie.’
‘What time did he leave you at Queen Charlotte Street this morning?’
‘Eleven forty.’
‘He didn’t get to me until twelve thirty. I didn’t raise it with him, for I was too concerned with other things, but I copped a whiff of his breath when I was showing him into my office. I reckon he might have stopped off somewhere on the way. By the way, that is also just between you and me.’
‘Absolutely.’
McIlhenney nodded. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘let’s get on with business. Where are we in this chaotic investigation? By that I mean the murder of Gareth Starr, since that’s where it all started out. Take me through it.’
Wilding put a hand on the case folder on the desk. ‘With respect, sir, that isn’t where it started. The chain of events began when we were called to Starr’s betting shop, following his report of an attempted robbery, in the course of which he severed the so-called robber’s finger.’
‘So-called?’
‘Yes. We now know that it wasn’t Starr who called the police, but Big Ming, when he arrived back early from the corner shop and collided with the guy as he was running off. There was no hold-up; according to Eddie Charnwood, the clerk, the plastic gun we found belonged to Starr himself. Another thing: Starr told us he kept the bayonet in his safe, but according to Charnwood he kept it under the counter. The man faked the crime scene, sir.’
‘So Starr attacked the man, not the other way round?’
The sergeant nodded. ‘That’s how I see it. He said that the bloke came in, pointed the fake gun at him and demanded money. We know that didn’t happen. We know from Smith that the man was hanging about outside the shop when he left, as he did at eleven every morning, to go up to the corner shop. That suggests to me that the man went in there to talk to Starr, not to rob him.’
‘Or to collect on a bet? Could there have been a dispute about money owed?’
‘That’s possible: there was money on the counter, nailed down by the bayonet. But I don’t think it’s as simple as that. In his statement, Starr was at pains to describe the man as drugged up to his ears, but Smith’s version doesn’t bear that out. There’s also a big disparity in the two stories when it comes to age. Big Ming put him early twenties, much younger than his boss did, and he was quite certain about that. No, my belief is that Starr knew the man, but we’ll have to find him to prove that.’
‘Okay, go back to the sequence of events. An investigation into the faked robbery begins, but there’s no trace of the perpetrator slash victim. It’s hardly under way before Starr is found, trussed up, tortured and murdered. You and Bandit are now in charge of both investigations.’
‘Yes.’
McIlhenney leaned back in his chair until it creaked. ‘Why did you walk away from the idea that Nine-fingered Jack might have done it?’
‘For a variety of reasons. We had medical advice that someone with such a severe wound couldn’t have begun to do what was done to Starr. We considered that he might have enlisted help, but there were problems with that too. Just as Smith did, Starr appears to have admitted his killers to the house, and then to have been rendered helpless without a struggle. He wasn’t a soft touch: there was another bayonet in the house, and a shotgun. If a gang had turned up, he’d have gone down fighting. On top of all that, there’s the drugs that were used to subdue him. They weren’t over-the-counter stuff.’
‘So what’s the premise of your investigation, on the basis of what you know?’
‘I . . . we, DCI Mackenzie and I, believe that the murder is related to Starr’s apparent drug-dealing, rather than the incident in the shop.’
‘Turf wars?’
‘Who knows?’ Wilding replied. ‘New team in town, maybe? Sending out a message?’
‘If that’s so, we’ll hear more from them. But from what we’ve learned so far, Starr was the new team himself, or relatively so. I’d be more inclined to look among the old players. The trouble is, the way he was killed doesn’t fit any of them, or any of the boys through in the west. They’d just have shot him and dumped the body in a field somewhere. No, Ray, I think we know who did this already; that is, I reckon he’s within, or relates to, the circle you’ve encountered in your investigation.’
‘Did we get anything out of Spain, sir?’
‘Eventually. The SDEA were a bit sniffy about sharing the information, but Mario threatened to ask the Crown Office to order them to release it. They backed down at that. It’s pretty clear that the garage in Pamplona was a staging point for cocaine coming into Europe through North Africa. It was owned and operated by two Egyptian brothers, Darius and Garai Goma. They were gone when the place was raided. The Guardia Civil are pretty certain that they had a warning from a contact in the local police force.’
‘That doesn’t take us much further.’
‘On the face of it, it doesn’t,’ McIlhenney conceded. ‘It’s shut off the supply route, but that doesn’t help our investigation. So come on, let’s look at the cast of characters again. Starr, deceased. James Smith, alias Big Ming, deceased. Oliver Poole, solicitor? I’ve known Ollie Poole for years: he’s respected on both sides of the court, he’s a member of the Law Society council, and he’s making a bloody fortune. I’ll interview him again if necessary but I don’t regard him as a suspect. Mrs Kitty Philips?’
‘She’s got a whole bingo hall for an alibi, plus she’s got no motive. She took plenty from Starr in the divorce.’
‘The girlfriend?’
‘Can’t see it: the relationship was very casual.’
‘That just leaves Charnwood, the clerk. What do you know about him?’
‘DCI Mackenzie dealt with him, sir. His view was that he is what he seems, an employee who was trusted because he’s good at his job.’
‘Any previous?’
‘None at all: he’s an upright citizen, family man, with a wife named Sorry, and a young son.’
McIlhenney looked up. ‘What did you say the wife’s name is?’
‘Sorry, or so Kitty Philips told us.’
‘Is that right?’
‘Unusual, isn’t it?’
‘Mmm. Eddie Charnwood was with Bandit when he discovered the drugs and the money, wasn’t he?’
‘That’s right. DCI Mackenzie said he nearly fainted when he saw them.’
‘Indeed? Who opened the safe, Ray?’
‘Charnwood did. That’s why Bandit took him to the shop.’
‘And how did he open it? With a key?’
‘No, the boss said it had a combination lock.’
‘So, Gary Starr kept a fortune in drugs and cash in his office safe, and Eddie Charnwood knew the combination.’
Wilding stared at him. ‘He knew they were there? But he opened the safe for us?’
‘What choice did he have? Ray, he was Starr’s trusted clerk, the core of the busine
ss in a way, and there would be times when the boss was away and he had to lock up the takings. It’s inconceivable that he wouldn’t have known the combination.’
‘But it was him who told us that the fake gun belonged to Starr.’
‘Was there any way he could have known that Starr claimed it was used in the fake robbery?’
Wilding drew in a breath and let it escape in a great sigh of realisation. ‘Fuck! Starr was here for most of the afternoon after the incident. He was just leaving when I arrived to take over from Sammy Pye. I actually heard Oliver Poole say that he’d drive him home, and Starr say okay. Charnwood ran the shop all afternoon, and he never saw Starr. He wasn’t a witness, so we didn’t need him. Bloody hell.’
‘Exactly. Now consider this. Back in the eighties, when McGuire and I were the disco kings of Edinburgh, I pulled a woman one Saturday at Buster Brown’s. She was lovely, did a magnificent turn, and her name was Sorry. I ribbed her about it, and she told me it was short for Soraya. She was Egyptian.’
The superintendent stood up. ‘Come on, Ray, let’s go for them. We’ll take armed back-up, but I have a hell of a feeling we won’t need it. They’re too smart to be there waiting for us.’
Fifty-eight
‘You gentlemen seem to come in a rush,’ Sylvia Thorpe exclaimed.
‘I beg your pardon?’ said Ray Wilding.
‘I mean it: you’re like buses and bills. You don’t see any for while then they arrive in twos and threes. My office has had no contact with the police for over a year, and now we hear from you and your colleague Sergeant McGurk at one and the same time.’
‘It’s pure coincidence,’ the sergeant replied, wondering as he spoke what the DCC’s office-bound assistant had been up to. ‘I’m involved in a complicated investigation and the name I gave you has cropped up in it.’
‘Not nearly as complicated as Sergeant McGurk’s, or as interesting: I’m sure you’ll hear about it in due course. As for your enquiry, it was much simpler. Soraya Goma, pharmacist, of Cairo, Egypt, and Edward Charnwood, clerk, of sixty-two Glenochil Terrace, were married in Edinburgh four years ago; their son, Edward Hosni Charnwood, was born in June the year before last. I’ll fax the certificates to the number you gave me.’
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